Why we need better arts education in the Arab world

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“If the Arab world continues to under-value
arts education, it risks falling even further behind developed
countries in preparing students for the knowledge economy,” wrote
Maysa Jalbout in her recent post titled ‘Arts education in the Arab world deserves more
respect – and resources’.

Let’s build upon that. The question of the
importance of the ‘arts’ has been investigated by Daniel Pink in
his bookA Whole New Mindwhere he argues that this era demands a whole new set of
skills which our rational-biased societies—madly in love with
disciplines such as law, medicine, business and engineering—have
thus far looked at with disdain and haughtily labelled as a “waste
of time”.

According to Pink’s research, however, “the
MFA is the new MBA” and the future belongs to individuals with
“high-concept, high-touch abilities” who bring together design,
story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. “These six senses,” he
says, “increasingly will guide our lives and shape our
world.”

In reality, the Middle East and North Africa
has a long, illustrious history with the “six senses”. We see
evidence of it to this day in Islamic art that covers not only
sacred spaces and courtyards from Spain to China, but even objects
of everyday life—such aspen boxesandutensils—which were
decorated with beautiful calligraphy and ornaments so as to allow
the beholder to “pierce through the veil of material existence”, to
borrow a phrase from Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This personification of
‘things’ and the high-minded, spiritual relationship people had
with both the sacred and the secular once defined the character of
the region and the worldview of its custodians.

Pink admits: “These abilities have always
comprised part of what it means to be human. But after a few
generations in the Information Age, these muscles have atrophied.
The challenge is to work them back into shape.” Here we are not
simply talking about the technical skills required to make quick,
“15 minutes of fame” art; Rick Williams and Julianne Newton write
inVisual Communication: “To become an educated person in the 21st century
requires not only verbal and mathematical proficiency but also the
ability to interpret, critique, create, and use visual
communication on sophisticated levels.”

Our intuitive skills—our ‘cultural’
muscles—are the ones that have atrophied, and no one has described
our present situation better than Beeban Kidron, who laments,“Technical access has never been greater, cultural access
never weaker.”

Arts education, not just in the Arab world,
is often embarrassingly technical and uncreative. Sometimes it
really feels likewe are training technicians, not awakening
artists. Williams and Newton
write: “Limiting our educational processes and cultural expressions
to rational, linear techniques creates a rational bias. In doing
so, we deprive our culture and ourselves of holistic development of
our intuitive intelligences and of our ability to transcend basic
technique and to express ourselves with creative and aesthetic
sophistication in drawing and in other problem-solving activities
that require creative thinking.”

There is another problem. What we have today
is form without meaning, appearances without understanding, and a
lot of technical jargon but no substance. The artistic genius that
once dynamically intertwined form and meaning is being replaced by
an art “in which sensation, not story, is king”, as Kidron would
put it.

Take as an example the arabesque, which
“through its extension and repetition of forms interlaced with the
void, removes from the eye the possibility of fixing itself in one
place and from the mind the possibility of becoming imprisoned in
any particular solidification and crystallization of matter,”
writes Nasr inIslamic Art and
Spirituality. Repeating
arches and columns in mosques and courtyards symbolize the rhythms
of life and punctuate the phases of the human journey, while
courtyard fountains serve both as natural air-conditioners and,
through the soft sound of flowing water, remind us of how our
intellectual and spiritual journey should look like: always in
gentle motion and self-renewing, always life-giving. Similar
observations can be made about traditional music and
poetry.

We all tend to attribute the successes of the
so-called “Islamic Golden Age” to places like the House of Wisdom
and to the great scientists who roamed the lands and transformed
the world with their open-mindedness and inventions, and, without a
doubt, they all played an essential role in “pushing the human race
forward”. Once again, however, this shows our rational bias and
underestimation of the ‘psychological’ role that art and
architecture played in generating healthy, diverse, and deeply
humanistic environments from which flowed most of the region’s
famous discoveries and innovations.

While it’s essential that we stress arts
education in general in order to refine our inner eye, cultivate
our creativity, and develop intuitive skills, it’s equally
essential that we teachthe history, philosophy and inner meaning of our indigenous
art(and of other art forms as
well). This is a critical step intaking ownership of our cultures; without a profound and continual emphasis on meaning,
without beautiful substance, we become prone to intellectual
colonisation and blind imitation.

Oubai is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at McGill University. He is interested in crowd-driven innovation and multidisciplinary collaborations. His main passion is human-design interaction and the role design plays in shaping society and culture. Oubai is also the cofounder of theÂ Arab Development Initiative. You can reach him onÂ his blogÂ or on Twitter at @obeikurdy.